Page’s Passion Leads Jazz to a Positive Culture that Drives Business Outcomes

Page’s Passion Leads Jazz to A Positive Culture that Drives Business Outcome

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Like many human resources professionals, Susan Rader Page is passionate about creating corporate cultures that drive business outcomes while creating positive workplaces in which employees and leaders can be authentic and successful.

“I truly believe that people, these days, shouldn’t have to
bring a different self to work,” Page says of her work. “I love having honest
conversations with people and teaching them how to communicate in a way that’s
going to translate not only into what they do day in and day out here but how
they’re a better mother, a better father, a better partner… It’s just, in
general, being your best self.”

Creating an environment that allows employees to be themselves
and use their talents to further the organization means encouraging teams to be
open and vulnerable with one another, Page says.

When it comes to creating workplace change, Page said she
focuses on starting the change process with a well-defined problem. Once the
problem is well defined, it becomes easier to seek solutions.

Page was able to put her process to work recently. After 12
years of working for her current employer, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, she decided it
was time to tackle inconsistencies in leadership and management. Specifically,
work had never been done to create best practice guidelines for leadership and
management, and the lack of a framework was causing challenges for employees.

“Year over year, we were seeing that people weren’t getting
out of their leadership and out of their managers what they wanted. There was
low engagement; people weren’t being coached and developed in the way they
needed to be. She said. “I went to my
boss, who was head of talent management, and I said, ‘Let’s brainstorm a
solution that would be impactful and get executive support because we can’t
keep spinning our wheels.’”

From there, Page and her predecessor, as the head of talent management, worked to define a concrete problem to present to the company’s CEO. They pulled together the data that illustrated the problems they were seeing. They crafted a business case for making transformational leadership a priority for the company.

“We went to the CEO and said we want to address this. We
don’t know how yet, and we need your support” she said.

The approach worked, and Page and her team were given the
authority to undertake the extensive project of defining what makes for good
leadership and management, what traits of a good leader were crucial for Jazz,
and what types of leadership habits didn’t work. They engaged employees at all
levels and brought in an innovative vendor to help with the process.

Once Page and her team began the process, the enthusiasm
spread.

“It started resonating with people because we had never
defined that, and we had a lot of inconsistency with what good looked like,”
Page said.

Through their work, Page and her team came up with six behaviors
of effective leadership and management, and they set out to enable a blended
learning approach to embed those characteristics into the workplace culture companywide.
They’ve held live training for employees, created web-based “open mic”
conversations that allow employees to discuss leadership and management case
studies together, and they created an online portal that allows participants to
share ideas, challenges, and successes with one another.

While Page is still compiling data on the impacts of her project, they’ve received positive feedback. Most importantly, the company has seen an improvement in the way that employees can lead projects throughout the company matrix by working successfully with teams from other departments located in different parts of the globe. This year, Page and her team were recognized with a Silver Brandon Hall award in the Best Learning Program Supporting a Change Transformation Strategy.

Page said that project had brought her the most pride of
any of the work that she’s done in her career For her, it demonstrates the value of
beginning with a carefully defined problem, continuing to ask the difficult
questions and engaging people and encouraging managers and leaders to be their
best self. The feedback from employees has shown the value human resources can
provide within a company.

“To me, that was always the thing: What does HR really do,
what does talent management really do. What’s in it for me as an employee?”
Page said. “People come to us as strategic partners, which is when you know that
you are driving value in the organization.”

Louis Carter is CEO and founder of Best Practice Institute, social/organizational psychologist, executive coach and author of more than 11 books on leadership and management including his newest book just released by McGraw Hill: In Great Company: How to Spark Peak Performance by Creating an Emotionally Connected Workplace. He has lectured globally in the U.S., Middle East, and Asia on his work and research in organization and leadership development and is an executive coach and advisor to CEOs and C-levels of mid-sized to Fortune 500 organizations. He was named one of Global Gurus Top Organizational Culture Gurus in the world and was chosen to be one of 100 coaches to be in the MG100 (Marshall Goldsmith) out of 14,000 people as one of the top 100 coaches in the world .

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